the wrong kind of stone
by lemonsharks
Summary: Falling in love with Anders was always a terrible idea.
1. Calm Parting, Still Air

They ran out of land in Antiva.

The whole country had carried the smell of life and decay, rich earth and new crops and the dung of the sheep and goats and cattle that ranged the flat, grass-covered plains. Jona Hawke thought for a moment that she'd look up the assassin they'd encountered months before, cash out the goodwill for a few weeks of extra protection.

Then she thought better. Perhaps Zevran no longer traded on the particular skills that brought him to her attention. Perhaps a man with a price would always _listen_ to a higher bid-even if he rejected it in the end.

Merrill turned east two days before they reached the Venefication Sea, bright blue and warm. It teamed with living things the likes of which simply did not think about settling down raising small rafts of mussels or barnacles on the pilings at the Kirkwall docks. Hawke had never seen a place less filthy than the glass-clear waves and the blinding white sand on the edge of the forest that called her friend away.

They were down to three the day they reached the edge of Antiva and went west, as they'd always planned. A packed-dirt track ran along the cliff side a quarter mile inland. Anders trailed fifty yards or so behind; Jona walked just ahead of her sister, sword loose in its scabbard and shield already on her arm.

No one came for them. Justice kept his peace. Jona knew he wouldn't always, and didn't press their luck. Such as it was.

The party camped late and rose early, sheltering beneath the broad-limbed beach willows and not, particularly, attempting to keep the damp from collecting on their things. A mist rose up from the sea two or three hours before sunrise. The damp had become very much a companion on this leg of the trip, and it brought mildew with it. _When we settle_ , she thought, _when we find a place we won't be chased, I'm going to wash every piece of clothing we own til my hands bleed from the lye._

For now, while they traveled, she didn't let herself dwell on the dread that lived at the base of her skull. On the chill on the back of her neck. But she knew, she knew. They might never find a place wild enough, distant enough, quiet and small and un-ruled. And they would have to choose, when they settled, between the Chantry and the Qun.

Jona would sooner turn return Anders and her sister to the Circle herself than see them treated as _Saarebas_. Lips sewn shut, eyes sewn shut, their very selves stripped from them for their power. Bethany, at least, could talk her way back in. Argue circumstance for her flight. Anders would choose death before tranquility.

She woke to the dream of a brand and the first cackling calls of the sea birds, Anders glowing beside her in the half-light. Jona let him sleep and went to bury the remains of last night's fire.

Bethany was already awake. She carried their full water-skins over both shoulders, and net bag full of slightly under-ripe plums in one hand. She'd left her staff behind-

-What if she'd been attacked?-

-But she hadn't; they'd had precious little trouble since they parted ways with Fenris and Isabela on the docks outside Ostwick. _Bethany can take care of herself. She can crush a man with nothing but her mind._

Mother would've been so proud of her, and Father would have been utterly horrified.

"You shouldn't go out wandering with no way to defend yourself, little sister," Jona said. Malcolm Hawke's voice whispered in her ear. _Take care of them, keep them safe. I'll be counting on you._

Bethany ignored her warning and handed over one of the riper plums. She dropped the bag with their provisions, and started striking her part of the camp.

Quiet and efficient and thoughtful, as she had been on the passage to Gwaren in those days after the Witch left them to their own fate. Safe enough from the horde, and too much a distraction from the "things" she needed to do back in her home. Nothing but a smirk and a cloud of ash for her goodbye.

"I'll be leaving you in Minrathous," Bethany said, strapping her bedroll to her pack. "And there are a couple of gulls' nests with eggs, still, if we want to get some before we start off. Your choice."

"You can't just drop that kind of an announcement and then go off about eggs!" Jona hissed. She wished they bought a horse and cart when they had the coin for it; she would like very much to put something large and easily frightened between herself and her sister right now. It would force her to-to breathe, to calm, to stay her fear.

The mist clung to her skin in a film. They moved faster without a cart.

"Do you want me to apologize? I won't. It's as good a choice as any we can make, you know."

"You think you'll last ten minutes in Tevinter?"

"You think I'm so useless I won't? Nobody's going to notice one more mage. And they have a whole industry there, people like me, who build their entire lives making ice for the magisters' kitchens. I might do that while I ... "

 _Think of something better._

Bethany shrugged. She pulled an oil-soaked cloth from a pocket on the side of her pack, and rubbed down the metal parts of her staff. Blade at the top. Mace head at the bottom. When she ran out of magical energy or lyrium or both she could still break an attacker's skull, and she knew how.

Four months since she'd had the dust of Kirkwall's Chantry in her lungs, and Jona still hadn't the faintest idea what better they might aspire to.

 _We'll think of something_ , she'd said to Aveline. The guard hadn't believed her and hadn't needed to say as much aloud.

That something she was supposed to think of hadn't come up yet.

"They make slaves out of mages too, _you know_ ," Jona whispered.

"I won't get myself into debt, then. I won't gamble, and I'll be careful to stay indoors after dark. Once you're out of Tevinter, the two of you are safer without me, anyway."

Bethany tucked the cloth away again, and swung her staff in a couple of swift arcs that could have liberated a man's head from his body. Were she so inclined. The air itself smelled of burnt thyme and smoking oil, as it often did when Bethany worked her sorcery.

The words formed just beneath her tongue, _Let's make a game of it, a duel. If I can disarm you, you'll stay with us so far as the Anderfels. If I can't, I'll let you go without a fuss._

She wrapped her hand around the hilt of the Arishok's sword, the wire and leather wrappings familiar now after so many years of faithful service. She could feel Meredith's blood in the blade, though her baby sister had landed the killing blow. Had conjured the stone from the ground that snapped the Knight-Commander's neck.

Jona's challenge died in her throat. All she wanted was Bethany, ten, to spring into her room far too early and beg that Jona braid her hair. _I can't do it backwards, please, will you?_

"You're the only family I have left," she said.

"Am I?"

Anders stirred, then, but didn't wake. He scarcely slept at all. More often, he volunteered to take first watch and _stayed_ awake til Jona or Bethany got up of their own volition.

At some point this morning he'd regained his ordinary complexion, skin no longer crackling. For a few moments just before they hid the final signs of their camp and left, he would have peace. As Justice had turned to Vengeance, she wondered how long they had til Vengeance turned to Wrath. Could spirits change into demons?

Her sister might have given her the answer, if she would ask. She had six years in the Circle and all the answers their father had denied them all that time ago. Anders himself might know, but she'd given her ultimatum and he'd agreed to it.

 _We are finished here-with rebellion, with violence, with the mage underground and with affecting huge, sweeping change in the world. If you want me in your life now, you must agree that that portion of your life is over. The rest we'll face when we must._

And Jona had agreed she would bring up nothing from that chapter of his life.

Bethany was her only blood-kin, outside of Gamlen and Charade, outside of whatever cousinage Malcolm Hawke had kept from them or had not known about himself. The only kin that knew her, the only kind that mattered.

"You know the kind I mean," she said, at last.

Anders yawned. Jona turned from her sister and started packing the few remaining things that they'd left out. He inched from their bedroll, stood with a stretch, and touched the back of her head by way of greeting on his way to attend morning business. As he always did.

When Anders had realized he was _allowed_ touch, permitted the warmth of her skin for his own, he had reveled in the privilege. It took him the better part of that first year, when she ached for the loss of her mother and he hadn't even the beginning of a theory on how to offer succor for that wound.

 _We'll need to divide up the supplies and the rest of the coin, when we reach Minrathous_ , Jona thought.

The practicality stilled her tin pot and plates clanged against one another when she stacked them.

If she turned around and went back to Kirkwall now, would the city welcome her? Would they settle her throat on the block and make her oldest friend strike the killing blow? Would she even still merit a swordsman for her executioner? Or would a blunt axe have to do for the treachery of mercy she'd committed?

"You should've woken me up," Anders said, now returned. He shook the sand out of their bedroll and folded it precisely, all sharp corners and neat edges he'd learned as a Warden and never discarded.

"I'll wake you early when you've slept every night for a week," she replied. Then, "Bethany found some gulls' eggs and plums this morning. Apparently we have to do some rock-climbing if we want the former."

Behind them, the sun crested over water, and began to burn away the fog.


	2. Empty Glasses

She had, of course, heard stories of Minrathous.

Fenris in his cups called it a roiling place, dead with the magic baked in its limestone city walls. He had said that the ordinary people inched along the edges of the streets, of their own lives, keeping the way clear for litters and divans and the processions of magisters and their guards and their slaves. Those men who were cowards, who hid even from the day itself. Who wielded in their cowardice all the power of the old Imperium.

"You can taste _them_ in the water," he'd said once, in the dark place between a joke and a reminisce. "And everyone else. It's bitter. Poisoned."

Jona hadn't liked the elf at all then, though she trusted him, and trust meant family more as much as blood ever did. She'd placed a glass of boiled Kirkwall water by his bedside when she left him for the evening.

 _Anders_ put all of his poetry into spinning yarns of a place he'd never seen, never been, of stories printed in books in a language he couldn't, didn't read. _Didn't read_ well, he'd corrected at the time. "They teach you Tevene in the Circle, but it never stuck with me. I might have gotten out sooner if I paid more attention to it. Tevinter spells are stronger than most of ours."

When they arrived, was neither a white city nor a black one, but as with all the things she did somewhere in-between. It was choked with the dust of yellow mortar and crumbling cement and men and women buying and selling and tearing down and building on top of the ruin left behind by their forebears.

The thrown-open gate reminded her of Kirkwall, and not-Kirkwall; they reminded her of the low stone barricade around most of Lothering, the harbor chain protecting Gwaren from attack by sea.

"How much Tevene do you actually know?" she asked Anders, then, as she craned her neck and took in a sliver of the gate.

" _More than you, less than me_ ," Bethany replied in that language.

"I believe she just said she's a wretched show-off," Anders said with fondness.

" _You_ wouldn't have me any other way."

"No one ever smacked her for being pert as a child, did they?"

"Not Bethany," Hawke said. "She got _talkings-to_."

The crowd shoved them forward. As good a reason as any to get moving.

Hawke sheathed her sword and settled her shield at her back. She sauntered in with Bethany at her right hand and Anders at her left, and the world did not rumble beneath them. The gate attendant only noted something about from whence they'd come.

After he spoke, Bethany repeated his words, "He said we sound like Kirkwall, and that they've had too many of those the last month or so. But he'll put down Ostwick if we're certain we're telling the truth."

"We're certain," Hawke said. Smiled. Nodded. Pulled open the strings of her purse.

She knew this routine. She'd played his part in this routine before.

The portage fees were listed up on a sign above this petty bureaucrat's head, in Tevene and the common tongue below, with hashes and painted coins to the side for the illiterate. The man adjusted his draping garment on one shoulder. His fingers buzzed with magic when she touched him, sliding a stack of coins across the table between them. She placed two sovereigns at the bottom, which disappeared.

"Ostwick," the porter said, in a round, sonorous accent Hawke wouldn't stay long enough to get used to. He gave them back a smile and a nod and a wave into the city.

No one else remarked upon their entry.

"' _Sounding like Kirkwallers_ ' was not all he said," Anders murmured as they passed.

"I am not translating _all he said_ ," Bethany replied.

There was a time when the Champion of Kirkwall could have traded on her name.

Maybe she still could have, here as she didn't dare try in the Free Marches.

Maybe killing the Arishok still counted for something here. Maybe it counted for more than picking up the hourglass that had been the Templar order, and hurling it against the wall rather than flip it over for another round.

Maybe that meant more here than it had back home.

You couldn't tell slave from freeman most times. Few wore iron collars or iron shackles, but when you went to meet a man's eyes not all of them would. Fewer of those had been draped with precious stones and metals, dressed up in finely- woven, clean linen. Those walked close to the men who owned them like ornamented pets, and those men dressed in silk and stank of perfume and volatile oils.

"I say we find a room in the shitty part of town," Hawke said.

The shitty part of town, it turned out, was situated in the northernmost part of the city. The containing wall arced inland, away from the sea. The sewage that had been collected from throughout Minrathous was hauled out into the fields surrounding it through the northern gate. The Imperial Highway veered around those fields, rather than cutting through them. You could get a bed and a door that closed for ten silver a night outside the wall and twenty inside it.

Hawke paid a sovereign for a bath, a door that locked and the innkeeper's discretion.

"You two could stay," Bethany said that night, over wine and a dish of dumplings in a squid-ink sauce.

They'd taken a corner table in the taproom, close to the back door with a view of all the other entrances and exits. Hawke shuffled a deck of cards but never dealt, debating whether they'd replenish their coffers faster running a confidence game or doing honest work. Or as honest as any of the work they ever did.

Anders rested one hand on her knee beneath the table, watching the other patrons with eyes blazing fade-blue beneath their usual ruddy hazel.

So many folk carried a mage's staff openly here.

One woman had hung hers with pouches, tiny ones, bigger ones, ones the size of the pomelos sold in the green market. She produced a coin from one and a set of cutlery from another and dug in to her supper with enthusiasm. A man near the door took his son by the back of the neck and steered him in a straight line up the stairs, on the opposite side of the room from Hawke's table. The lad's sister played with the glowing illusion of a string-game between her fingers, following behind them without seeing where she put her feet.

Jona stabbed a dumpling off Bethany's plate with the tip of her knife; she'd had bread and cheese and olives herself. Too hot to eat hot food when they'd come down.

"We could build a life here," Anders said.

He sounded hopeful, for the first time since they'd left Kirkwall. Like he believed in the possibility of a world that didn't want him in a cage. The air changed, a tiny cell around their table; static raised the hair on Jona's arms and sent a frisson down her spine.

Bethany finished her wine and took Jona's glass.

"This is the first place they'll come looking for us," Jona said.

"And the Chantry will find the fight of their lifetime waiting if they do."

Nobody seemed to notice the ragged edge on his voice, the light in his eyes, beneath his nails, in the lines that framed his mouth. Jona took Anders' hand and squeezed, twined their fingers, stroked the pad of her thumb up and down the length of his.

She didn't shush.

"We'll fight if we have to," she said. "But I'd sooner run that fight. Though we do need to stay a while and earn a bit of money, if nothing else. Everything you've said about the Anderfels makes me think opportunities aren't exactly thick on the ground where we're going."

He calmed, not entirely but _enough_ , and she wondered whether it was too late to turn around and find a little valley in Rivain, instead.

It was like that first year all over again—they found the least-shifty-looking smugglers in a twelve-block radius, and Jona sold them them her sword. Lyrium wasn't controlled by the Chantry here; mages walked the streets, muttering lists and tasks and place-names like ordinary people, and almost every one had a glowing blue flask or seven clipped to their belt.

No, the lyrium was not controlled by the Chantry, but it was inspected and taxed by the city, and kept almost entirely out of laymen's hands.

And with the city looking for its cut, came the businessmen looking to dodge the city, came the customers looking to buy just a little cheaper, came the need for guards and transport and all the shadow-cloaked bureaucracy that sprang up with employ for the likes of Jona Hawke and hers.

Her boss this time around was a man named Iulius, who offered to slake her thirst with a cup of the blue her first night.

"All my apologies, Lord, but I know how this goes. You drink one day; you're sick for two. You use the stuff for a month and you're in bed wishing your insides would boil away for a season. I've been there. I'd as soon not go back."

Thrask had taught her a few of his Templar tricks, and she hadn't used them since the Arishok. The weeks afterward, when Kirkwall had burned and kept burning, when you couldn't buy or steal a Lyrium flask to save yourself, those were easily the worst weeks of her life.

Iulius shrugged. Muttered that it was her loss, and settled a battered helm on his head.

He was a puffy, sun-browned sort of man, with round deep-set eyes and hands that could crush your bones if you let him get ahold of them. Big. Older and slower than he would've been in years past, but wilier than you. He'd come from the very southern end of Tevinter, and he spoke Orlesian and the common tongue as well he did Tevene, and that first night he paid her very well for roughing up a couple of idiots who thought it was a good plan to sell their wares in _his_ boss's territory.

After a particularly successful round a few weeks later, he'd taken her home to meet his wife and family. He liked her, and she liked being liked—liked having people, finding them, gathering them close around her. Jona took his youngest boy on her lap and tried explaining how to say her name for half an hour, his siblings and mother giggling the entire time. _Iona, Yona, Dona_ ; he never quite got the first sound, and it was well past his bedtime when she strolled back home.

He was a very nice child; they all were. And Flavia was a very kind woman, who spoke to Jona in the language of bread and salt, where they shared no words at all.

 _We could make a home here._

Some nights Jona sat awake by the fire and wrote home, wrote to Varric or Aveline or Fenris, the words scrawled out before her, _I have done things I regret. I've come to a place I swore I'd never revisit._ She shredded the paper each time and used it for kindling.

Anders found her like that after they'd been in Minrathous three months.

They'd taken a second room at the inn, and he'd started seeing patients there. This time he charged for his skill. Men and women who needed patching up but didn't want their spouses to know what they'd been up to paid, as so many people did, for service with a politely-turned head. Bethany found work in a forge, center-city. It was faster for a mage to heat the iron rods destined for nails or horseshoes than a boy with a bellows, and you could spell them for long wear and strength while you worked. All told, Jona could be in or out at any give hour, lazing in the taproom or knocked unconscious in her bed at noon or midnight. It all depended what time Iulius came calling for her.

There wasn't a last call so much as the hour where the barman locked the liquor away and went to bed, usually a bit before dawn. He shouted, _I'm going to sleep_!, and his warning echoed against the mostly-empty room in the two languages he spoke. Jona regarded her cup, thick beer warmed to the ambient, sticky-damp temperature of the room and almost gone, and she tossed the dregs back with a grimace. Not the ratpiss ale at the Hanged Man. A few degrees better in fact, but.

"It's not the ratpiss ale at the Hanged Man," she murmured for her own ears.

Anders found her with half a letter crumpled between her fingers and her eyes on the grainy-bottom of that empty cup. He dropped a many-times-folded broadsheet on the table in front of her.

Their table. Their people sitting 'round it, and not-their-people moving when they realized it had long been claimed. Sometimes Jona brought Iulius; sometimes Bethany dragged one of the smiths home with her before disappearing Maker-knew- where; Anders had never yet returned from the room that served as his clinic with a hanger-on. _He_ scarcely left this building.

Jona unfolded the sheet, tearing it down the middle accidentally. She lined the text up again as best she could, though she couldn't read more than a road sign and didn't understand nine spoken words of ten.

Some Minrathan lunatic had figured out moving type, and another one how to make paper thin as silk and a thousand times more flimsy. The business of distributing the news had sprung up less than twenty years ago, and nobody was, from what she gathered, quite sure how it might yet change the worlds of business, of magic, of faith.

A slapdash engraving of her face, and another of his in profile, took up a quarter page beside a fierce-looking block- print headline. The words beneath bent and blurred with aging metal type; a poorer paper, then. A paper that meant to make its fortune writing about the hill she would on.

He took a steadying breath and splayed his fingers, stretching the webbing taut between each one, as he often did in silent argument with the spirit camped out in his flesh. Jona touched the broadsheet, and wished her sister were here now. But Bethany had dug her fingers into life here, building up her own world as Hawke had done in Kirkwall, and she kept some of her people to herself.

Even without Bethany, she knew the word for _Kirkwall_ , and she knew the word for _war_ , and she knew how an artist could make his living instilling the fear of those who might destroy in those around him.

Jona Hawke's own picture glared back at her, ripped through the forehead, and angry.

Anders dropped into the seat beside her, and said, "We have a problem."


End file.
